Has a single thought ever changed your life?

[Entstoryench]

I've been reflecting on how important thoughts are, and how one thought can just change your life dramatically.

One example: when I was in my teens and early twenties, I was overweight. I was miserable and had no confidence. I always assumed that I always would be overweight and any attempts to loe weight were so half hearted.

Then one day I had this crystal clear thought: 'losing weight is completely in my control'. It sounds obvious, but I realised that if I changed my diet, I literally had the power to lose weight. Like, I actually had real control over this.

About a year later, I was 4 stone down and had to buy a whole new wardrobe of clothes. People didn't recognise me in the street and I replaced all of my old habits with lovely new healthy ones. 20 years later and I've pretty much kept it off and it was all down to that one thought that hit me like a tonnes of bricks one day.

Please share how a single thought changed your life!

If people don't like me as who I am then they arent the sort of people I want or need to be friends with.
Removed a lot of social anxiety from my life

Also, I am an emotional eater. I wasnt massively overweight but I ate so much sugary food it was a constant battle to have a healthier diet. Work is stressful and difficult situations would lead to me stuffing myself with biscuits. One day I thought, why should I let these people ruin not only my day but also my life and health. I don't want to give them that privilege. So when someone annoyed or upset me I thought, screw them, they don't deserve to have any control over the way I eat.

Stopped eating so much crap, lost weight (bonus), skin improved, feel healthier than I have in years.

What a great thread! It’s nice to read so many positive stories

My ex stabbed my dog, I was at the vets having ddog pts. I watched the light go out of his eyes and it suddenly struck me really hard, that one day my ex's violence would leave me laying on a floor(again) with the light going out of my eyes. I walked out of the vet a different person to the scared woman that had walked in. Nothing changed for ages, on the outside, but inside I had started to think the terrifying thought of getting away somehow.
This happened years ago but I still recall the cold certainty and the spark that overwhelmed me. I have a nice, safe, life now.

I was a massive overthinker - used to worry so much about what other people thought and doing the right thing because DM's favourite phrase was "what will people think?" I ended up spending a year abroad doing a job I hated, utterly miserable and lonely, because I didn't want people to say I'd given up.

On the flight home I looked out the window and saw a motorway full of cars and realised how many people there were in the world and how insignificant I was really. It was bizarrely freeing. I thought "I could completely fuck up things and the world would be just fine and most people really wouldn't give a damn."

On holiday in Africa, in the tour bus stuck in traffic and I was overthinking and stressing about my job and how I was going to manage my staff to reach a certain perceived level of customer service the company wanted. I looked out the window and three kids were playing on the side of a four lane road, in a cut up jerry can and they were having a ball and so happy. It was a lightbulb moment I realised in the middle of a continent where some people have daily struggles to get food and water I was stressed about my toxic workplace. I remember thinking, this is what life is not meant to be about.

I left my job not long after that and started the long path of getting my university degree and working in a field that felt more fulfilling and I love, I can still see the smiling faces of those kids and it motivates me to do more and appreciate little things more.

The recent realisation that you can’t change people but you can change how you respond/if you put up with it has really helped me make some decisions in my life.
It sounds obvious but because I strongly believe people can change I’d lost the concept that only they can do it

@PollyEsther I'd love to know what career you switched to. Lots of us would!

I'm studying to be an aged-care nurse. Life is too short to be stuck at a desk doing a bullshit job when I could be on my feet doing something worthwhile.

No moment of epiphany, just a long mulling over of what I'd like my life to amount to. I'm still doing a desk job, but that won't be forever.

Not so much of a thought but a dream. I had a dream the other night that I was rushing around, driving erratically trying to get home to my kids and I hit something and ended up plummeting to a certain death. And I was plummeting I was distraught thinking 'oh fuck they only have me! He will never never step up for them. They're going to be alone' which made me realise that I need to have a serious conversation with my 'partner' that he needs to seriously change and think about them rather than just himself all the time.

It was the moment I admitted to my dad that I left my emotionally abusive husband after being treated cruelly for years - my dad reacted angrily and said i would bring shame on the family for leaving and divorce isn’t an option. He’d then admitted he tried to leave my mum 10 years prior but his own parents threatened to disown him if he went through with it, so stayed for the kids and I should do the same.

Never in my life have I ever imagined my parents to be the role model I didn’t want for a relationship and in that moment everything made sense as to why I was getting into relationships with abusers. It was clear my parents hated each other and I grew up thinking that was normal, and the thought that went through my head at that moment was that I didn’t care what he thought and I wasn’t going to grow up being a bad example to my children to stay in a bad relationship regardless of how you’re being treated.

I’m very happy now and my children have thrived since I left, I care so much less about what other people think and my dad actually admitted he was jealous of me for doing it years later !! (So wrong on so many levels) parents are humans too and make massive mistakes, it really bursts a bubble when you realise!

Never ever self isolate, it is very dangerous to your mental health.

In the first 5 years of a relationship, woman will treat a man hope she wants to be treated.
in the next 5 years of the relationship, a woman will treat a man the same way he treated her.

I don't have a specific example to mind but usually when I am half asleep solutions and realisations of a situation come to my head. I love it

This is an incredible thread. Thank you so much everyone for sharing.

At 16 I had one thought that changed everything. 'If I don't get good grades in my exams, I'll never get away from my parents.'
Leaving to go to uni was my one chance to escape my home life. Before that thought, I was failing in school, didn't care about exams - just being a bratty teenager. It changed my mindset and 40 years on - I still remember that thought, where I was when I had it and how much calmer I felt knowing I had an exit path.

This is significant to me.

I am in what sounds like a similar situation.

Reading on MN that a job interview is as much about interviewing the employer as them interviewing you was a major mindshift for me.

Reading your post @Angelofthenortheast makes me think it might be time that I sack my employer.

'Doesn't matter. Nobody cares'

Said in a work meeting by a good friend when everyone was getting all flappy about a project. I see it as a positive statement - literally NO ONE cares about your small life dramas and truly, it really doesn't matter in the long run.

I often still use it to break the tension when everyone has lost perspective for one reason or another.

I was part of a group which was rapidly becoming a cult and though I was starting to realise it, I didn't have the guts to leave as I was scared of losing my friends, community, everything.

I was getting more and more worn down but kept going back, until one day (through a random series of events), I met a man who actually had a lot of experience in cults and understood how people got stuck in them. We ended up in conversation and he just said to me, 'your whole life is being controlled and you can't see it'. Although it wasn't my thought, there was this huge lightbulb moment and I remember saying, 'I'm never going to go back'.

And I didn't. I literally went and sat in my car, wrote a goodbye text to the leader (even though I didn't even owe them that) and then blocked them on everything. Amazingly, me leaving led to about 30 others (at least 10 of them were friends) also leaving, so in the end I didn't lose my friends at all.

Years later, I still don't understand how I got sucked into it but when the lights got switched on, I was out of there. So grateful and so much happier.

I was in a relationship with an awful man who treated me like crap. Constantly texting other women, cheated on me, I found messages where he slagged me off to other women all because he was desperate for an ego boost. And he was miserable as fuck too. Never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. And he was so sneery and bitchy about everyone and everything. I was depressed and hadn't realised how much of it was caused by this relationship.

It hasn't occured to me that I could just choose to leave. He'd had me feeling as though I had to make everything right and work at fixing it all because this was as good as it would get for me. I started taking antidepressants and they really worked. I remember at one point singing a silly song to my son narrating something we were doing, which is something I always do and always have done, but had stopped when I felt so depressed. He turned to me with a look of fake concern on his face and asked if I was ok. It was supposed to humiliate me and implied that I was weird and crazy for doing something so frivolous and pointless. A couple of hours later we were walking somewhere and I just had this epiphany that my partner was supposed to make me feel loved and cherished, and he didn't. I couldn't believe I'd never realised that before. So I told him so and we split up there and then.

I was on a diet and was meeting regularly with a diet coach. In that time I had a whiplash injury and was in absolute agony with my neck. When I was talking to my diet coach that week, I was telling her how much physical pain I was in and how I just wanted to 'stuff my face full of bad food'. She said to me, 'and will that make the pain in your neck go away?'

I had this lightbulb moment!

Maybe this thread.

"You don't have to do ANYTHING you don't want to do, everything is a choice"

Discovered this 20 years ago.

Yes, similar to uptrend.
I was miserable in a job where people spent their entire effort throwing each other under the bus. It was also a horrible drive.
I got in the car one morning. Half way there I suddenly thought "I am never doing this journey again".
Walked in, cleared my desk, emailed head honcho and walked back out again.
I was on the beach by lunchtime.

I grew up with parents who were together, family members who were all together and on a diet of the Hollywood happy-ever-afters. It never occurred to me that you don't have to be in a relationship. I was the typical "looking for all consuming love" that Carrie Bradshaw bleats on about (which frankly only led her to years of her chasing a man who didn't really want her and she was never the first choice).

After a series of long-term relationships (including a marriage and having a child with ex partners who I am still on good terms with) it occurred to me, on finding myself single again, that I'm not actually required to be in a partnership. Then it hit me that I'm so actively content living an independent life and I don't feel in the least bit lonely or like there's something missing. Quite the opposite, the thought of having to compromise and take on the baggage and emotions and everything that goes with having to share my life and my home with someone else feels me with dread. I will never be in a relationship again. I love my life as it is. The only thing I feel would complete me is a massive lottery win so I never have to work again!

"I can't do this anymore" as I was trying to find a hiding place for my 3rd empty bottle of wine.

Then I messaged a friend, went to a meeting and in 2 weeks time will celebrate my 9 years sober anniversary.

No dramas, no car accident, no major breakthrough, just a sudden admission of defeat and powerlessness.

in a long marriage -lonely and living separate lives with my husband but not thinking so could bear to leave my lovely garden I had nurtured for 25yrars. Then a new friend sent me a pic of a cottage in another area and said he thoughtI should buy one like it (it was just sold) Suddenly seemed possible. A year later am living in a tiny house completely unlike my old hose and a million times happier in my tiny garden.